Linguist - AI & Multilingual Research - Fluency in a Dravidian or Bantu Dialect

Linguist - AI & Multilingual Research - Fluency in a Dravidian or Bantu Dialect

We're looking for a research-level Linguist to join a world-class AI research environment, working at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, multilingual AI and Natural Language Processing.

This is an opportunity to apply deep linguistic expertise to cutting-edge AI research - analysing model outputs, building evaluation datasets and helping improve how advanced AI systems understand languages, dialects and cultural nuances at global scale. The team works across massively multilingual and low-resource settings, collaborating closely with research scientists, machine learning engineers and data scientists.

The Offer:

• Competitive salary of £81,000 pa
• Role to start on a contract until December 2027
• Fully remote working within the UK

What you'll be doing

• Analyse large linguistic datasets and AI model outputs, identifying frequent and severe linguistic errors.
• Build, refine and test evaluation and challenge datasets covering translation, linguistic reasoning, spontaneous speech, debate, tutoring and pronoun resolution.
• Conduct typological, sociolinguistic and corpus-based research across a broad range of languages.
• Support Responsible AI research, analysing areas such as toxic language, hate speech, gender bias and cultural bias.
• Develop clear annotation and translation guidelines for human annotators.
• Use Python, pandas and SQL to analyse datasets and support research workflows.
• Work directly with research scientists, ML/NLP engineers and data scientists, translating complex linguistic findings into actionable insights.
• Evaluate linguistic vendor outputs, identify error patterns and provide actionable quality feedback.

What we're looking for

• Completed PhD in Linguistics or a closely related field - the PhD must be fully completed, not currently in progress.
• Deep research-level knowledge of general/theoretical linguistics, particularly typology, syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, phonology and writing systems.
• Python is essential - you should be comfortable reading, modifying and executing data-science notebooks, including working with tools such as pandas.
• Ability to query databases using SQL.
• Native or near-native English plus native/near-native proficiency in a Dravidian or Bantu language; Swahili is particularly valuable. Other low-resource language expertise is highly regarded.
• Experience applying basic NLP techniques and ideally collaborating with ML, NLP, software engineering or data-science teams.
• Strong research and business communication skills, with the ability to explain linguistic findings clearly to highly technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working independently through complex and ambiguous research problems in a fast-moving environment.

The hiring team has specifically highlighted three non-negotiable areas: research-level theoretical linguistics, strong cross-functional communication/independent project delivery, and hands-on Python capability.

Why this role?

You'll have the opportunity to contribute to frontier AI research, tackling linguistic problems that go far beyond standard translation or localisation. The work spans complex linguistic reasoning, spontaneous speech, multilingual evaluation and cultural nuance, alongside scientists and engineers working on advanced machine-learning research.

This would particularly suit a Linguistics PhD who wants to take rigorous academic linguistic expertise into applied AI research, while remaining deeply involved in language research rather than moving into a purely software-engineering role.

Interested? Apply to learn more about the project and research environment.